At peace in obscurity

So how will the groundbreaking research of biophysicist William Levengood ultimately be regarded? For colleague Nancy Talbot, writing an obituary tribute on the controversial crop-circle investigator who died in September at 88, Levengood will go down as a visionary when science decides to catch up. “His work has laid a foundation upon which future scientific efforts will build,” she wrote, “and he will be remembered by many other people with whom he worked on additional not-yet-understood ‘anomalous’ phenomena.”

Can we, like, skip all this science stuff and get right to the space aliens, please?/CREDIT: sci-fimovieposters.co.uk

But Levengood’s passing went largely unnoticed otherwise, with barely a shrug from the UFO crowd. His death now leaves Talbot as the sole survivor of the BLT Research Team, which began making news in the Nineties for documenting truly remarkable biological abnormalities that appear to be percolating inside some crop circles. John Burke, the “B” in the BLT acronym, died in 2010. Today, Talbot carries on from Cambridge, Mass., despite that fact that her resources “have dwindled to almost nothing.”

Levengood’s critics actually wrote his obituary a decade or so ago during a heated row over his academic credentials — did he or did he not falsely claim he had a doctorate? But the sideshow couldn’t alter some inconvenient facts, chief among them that dozens of his unrelated botanical research papers had been accepted and published in mainstream peer-reviewed science journals. It’s unlikely Levengood’s CV would’ve incurred any scrutiny at all had he not immersed himself in cereology, a discipline so new, the word is a 21st century addition to the Oxford Dictionary. Undaunted by hoaxers confessing to creating wheat-field patterns with boards and ropes in 1991, BLT plunged headlong into the wrangle and subjected the grains to systematic inquiry. The team would eventually collect affected and controlled samples from 17 countries, from Australia to Scandinavia. And the data they compiled was solid enough for publication in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and twice in Physiologia Planatrum.

Combing through fields with and without the ornate geometric patterns, BLT discovered the targeted areas had been subjected to intense heat, of the electromagnetic variety. Plant-stem joints directly below the seed heads revealed the sort of drastic elongation and bending that could not be induced by mechanical flattening; samples collected at the circle centers tended to be the most egregiously affected. Sometimes the microwave temps were so high, moisture inside the stalks turned to steam which escaped by blowing holes through the nodes.

Levengood and Burke managed to replicate this activity in the lab by bombarding plants beneath an “ion avalanche” of energy that generated complex plasmas. Without her knowledge, Talbot tells De Void, they patented the process under the trademarked name Stressguard. “Levengood and Burke both knew that if I found out they were trying to patent it, I would’ve been upset,” she says. “I would’ve given it to the world and made it available to farmers for free.”

That’s because, according to the data, seeds from exposed corn, carrots and other vegetables exhibited accelerated growth rates, up to five times faster than normal. The faster growth rates also disrupted pest-infestation cycles, and produced higher yields. Which makes you wonder why Monsanto hasn’t glommed onto this thing. Hmm.

Anyway, analysis of surrounding soil augmented the crop-circle data in unanticipated ways. Clay minerals scanned through X-ray diffraction revealed crystalline structures previously undocumented in surface soil. The atomic architecture was more consistent with crystallinity created by centuries of heat and pressure from layers of sedimentary rock, at temperature levels you’d expect to incinerate the plants. “Obviously, I’d love to get more data,” says Talbot. “But XRD costs thousands and thousands of dollars, and that’s just money I don’t have.”

Bottom line: These findings have been out there in the refereed literature for well over a decade and, to the best of De Void’s knowlege, they’ve yet to be formally challenged. “Debunkers, of course, have responded negatively, but nobody has refuted the data,” Talbot says. “Mostly what they do is ignore it. It’s never brought up, it’s never discussed.”

Well, after all, research is expensive. On the other hand, jeez, you’d think, if we can spend $159 million on a single F-35 jet fighter …

Thanks for the article, Billy. I am not an expert like PurrlGurrl or Duff, so I do enjoy reading something that might change my mind. I have always figured crop circles to be scams (especially since so many hoaxers admit to making them). It is really hard to be open minded about something when I am well aware that any “data” I read could have been made up by pseudo-scientists and hoaxers, any video I see could be manipulated. I was unaware of the particular group you wrote about today. Their story sounds real, and it has awakened an interest in crop circles that I lost long ago.

Thanks for continuing to write for those of us who still “don’t know everything”, and still open our minds up a little bit, now and then.

Isn’t it a bit disturbing to the true believers, that after all these years of “UFO sightings”, “Yeti hairs”, “mysterious crop circles”, etc., the real scientists, who would normally be beside themselves with interest when something unexplainable is discovered, get more and more disinterested, more bored, more skeptical. It must be a giant conspiracy, right? Hilarious.

@PurrlGurrl-
You say you mean “No disrespect to the man himself”, yet you dismiss as a “non-event” the substance of his lifelong assertion that the material he claimed to handle was “not of this earth”. He therefore would have been either delusional or a compulsive liar, not capable of perceiving or telling the truth. I believe the evidence of his entire life proves him to be neither, and makes his claim deserving of further consideration.
A dismissive attitude is what I was attempting to challenge the media to overcome, so that we might remove the veils of ignorance and apathy regarding this subject.

Kudos to The Washington Post for ignoring Roswell. Take that away from Marcel, Jr.’s life and yes, you still have a distinguished veteran who served honorably, but the US has a lot of distinguished veterans and their passings get no notice from The Post. Besides, a lot of service people also served in Irag at an age when they should have been tossing a ball around with the grandchildren instead of going to war again (my best friends’s husband, for one). No disrespect to the man himself, but he was not a local figure in DC, nor was he a national one outside the minds of those obsessed with the Roswell non-event.

In the same vein of scant recognition, on 9/4/13 I emailed the following message to the editors of the Washington Post under the subject “A Profound Mystery- Ignored”:
On the day that his funeral services are being held in Montana, the Post
has yet to publish in its newsprint edition an obituary for Jesse Marcel Jr.
This oversight is difficult to fathom. Col./ Dr. Marcel, in addition to a
lifetime devoted to service in his country’s defense- including a tour in
Iraq at age 68- was also claimant to the extraordinary experience of
handling pieces from a crashed UFO at Roswell, N.M. when he was 10.
While people tend to dismiss children’s competency- until they need
help with their PC- Marcel’s claim persisted throughout his entire life
without variation or embellishment. His personal integrity and credibility
helped to overcome what might otherwise have easily jeopardized his
career. How long before the media stops ignoring or trivializing the
profound mystery represented by Marcel’s enduring claim, and
recognizes an obligation to actively support its solution?